Moral science has two halves. There are the implications of thinking straight about fact and value (ideal theory) and there are the implications of not thinking straight. Ideal theory is the foundation, error theory the daily battle.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Dishonest global warming survey counts skeptics as alarmists

"Survey: Scientists Agree Human-Induced Global Warming is Real"

So reads the press release put out by the survey takers. Sounds like evidence that "the debate is over" doesn't it? Until you read what the scientists actually asked:

Two questions were key: have mean global temperatures risen compared to pre-1800s levels, and has human activity been a significant factor in changing mean global temperatures.

About 90 percent of the scientists agreed with the first question and 82 percent the second.

Only 90% think the earth has warmed since the 1700's? That doesn't inspire much confidence, but at least the question is clear. The second question turns entirely on the meaning of "significant," which is not provided with any referent.

Both sides of the global warming debate expect human production of CO2 to have SOME effect on global temperature, and most skeptics would have little reluctance to label human effects "significant." Dangerous? No. Small compared to the natural sources of temperature variation? Yes. But that does not mean they are not significant.

Thus the survey utterly fails to distinguish between the two sides of the global warming debate. Yet the University of Illinois researchers pretend that it does:

Doran and Kendall Zimmerman conclude that "the debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely nonexistent among those who understand the nuances and scientific basis of long-term climate processes." The challenge now, they write, is how to effectively communicate this to policy makers and to a public that continues to mistakenly perceive debate among scientists.

They ask a survey question that is designed to elicit the same answer from alarmists and skeptics, then misrepresent the result as evidence that, amongst scientists, there are no skeptics. Pure intellectual fraud, just like Hansen and Schmidt and Mann and Schneider and Holdren and Chu and rest of the global warming liars.

All of these scientists know that global temperature has gone up and down with solar-magnetic activity throughout the millennia, and they all know that solar-magnetic effects are completely excluded from the models that depict 20th century warming as driven by C02. That is, they all know that they are engaged in fraud, just as Doran and Zimmerman have to know that their survey question does not distinguish between alarmists and skeptics, even as they claim that it does.

What an intellectually honest survey would ask

At current levels of industry and agriculture, how would you compare human and natural sources of global temperature variation (choose one):

Note that the IPCC's position, about which there is supposedly no debate, is approximately 5. Skeptic positions range from 1 to 3. I myself am a 1, yet I would still have little qualm calling human effects "significant." In particular, I am hopeful that as the current global cooling continues, sucking the CO2 and the water vapor out of the atmosphere along the way, aggressive human burning of coal, oil shale and tar sands might be able to put enough CO2 back into the atmosphere to raise the floor on global cooling perhaps by a degree or two.

The less CO2 and water vapor there is, the more heat trapping work is done by each increment of human produced CO2. Just because human activity is not at present having much warming effect does not mean we CAN'T have a useful effect, if we put our backs into it.

UPDATES:

I emailed Doran, politely letting him know that I put up a post calling him on his fraud. He politely emailed back that it seemed I had only read his press release, and directing me to a link to the published article. It is not significantly different from his press release, which is taken pretty much verbatim from the article.

'It's really dangerous for the public to think we are still debating about global warming,' he said.

And so he comes up with this fraudulent survey, that alarmists and skeptics will give the same answers to, making it look like there is no debate.

An example of skeptics who would be labeled as alarmists under Doran's scheme comes from Luboš Motl's review of the new book by Tim Balling and Patrick Michaels:

The authors classify themselves as believers in man-made contributions to global warming but disbelievers in the climate apocalypse. Rationally speaking, I agree with them.

They explain that the moderate climate scientists such as themselves are being prosecuted [sic].

In Doran's scheme, the views of Balling, Michaels and Motl are evidence that there is no debate, and that we should reject as dangerous the idea that there is still debate. He takes their persecution and recasts it as justification for persecution.

As the hoax of dangerous CO2 caused warming comes unraveled, the work of enablers like Doran should not be forgotten.

You are fucking C R A Z Y! Did God make all of the little peoples and animals on the earth too? Oh and let me guess, we are the only form of life in all of the universes out there...we are the only ones! Get a fucking life nut job!

The fact that you state you believe, "Human effects on global temperature are tiny compared to natural effects," shows that you have not done your share of scientific research. Your thoughts on this matter have no bearing in the overwhelming scientific evidence that is present. What is your scientific backing? or is that just a hunch?

It is evident that you are an economist and not a climatologist. Your views are economy driven and have almost no scientific backing. The current CO2 levels are much higher (390 ppm) than they have been in the last 2.1 million years and are 30% higher than CO2 levels in the last 400,000 years (300 ppm)... AND your solution is to increase CO2 to warm the planet for the ice age??? Which isn't scheduled to come for at least 10,000 more years! Brilliant! Turn the planet into an enormous science experiment with possibly devastating consequences.

You don't seem to care much about future generations. You and I will be long gone before the majority of the global extremes hit anyway, but what does that matter, you will always have your money.

Since anonymous casts my analysis as economic, it seems he did follow the link, where I provide an economic analysis of the external value of CO2 (unambiguously positive). Obviously that analysis stands on the scientific facts about the effects of CO2 (extensively linked). So it is telling that he can ask "what is your scientific backing?"

Anonymous is engaged in what I call "backwards thinking." Instead of following reason and evidence, he is looking for excuses to dismiss reason and evidence that contradicts his presumptions. He sees that my analysis is labeled economic and sees that as an opportunity to jump to the (errant) conclusion that it is therefore not climatological, even when the supporting climate evidence is laid out in front of his face with links to source documents.

And does he seriously think I am getting PAID for my efforts to expose the overwhelming scientific evidence that CO2-warming effects are small compared to natural drivers of temperature? I wish.

About Me

Here is a short bio I sent to press people covering the Flight 93 memorial debacle. My training is as an economist. I was in the PhD program in economics at Stanford until my research led me more towards moral theory and constitutional law, at which point I dropped the program and started working on my own. I was writing a book on republicanism (the system of liberty under law) for World Ahead Publishing when I discovered that the Flight 93 memorial was going to be a terrorist memorial mosque. World Ahead agreed to first publish my book about this rehijacking of Flight 93 (Crescent of Betrayal, temporarily available for free download at CrescentOfBetrayal.com). This is not my first venture into journalism. Over the years I have been a writer, opinions editor, and advisor for Stanford’s conservative campus newspaper The Stanford Review, and am currently on the Review’s board of directors.